Here's weird question !
Are both the batteries in these cases conventional lead acid batteries ?
It sounds it . Especially the car that was driven with the headlights
and the nav unit on , What is being said there is that while the car was
being driven the alternator was NOT capable of supplying enough power
to run the car and charge the battery or , in a more likely scenario ,
the battery is partially what we used to call sulfated and is so
resistant to charge it was slowly losing power . Generally speaking when
you come home after driving the car and throw your tender on most of the
time it should go straight to green . The exception to this would be the
half hour errand run down town where you started and stopped the engine
6 times as you went from place to place but the total run time on the
engine was 10 or 12 minutes . In a case like that the starter may have
pulled the battery down a little and the drive home wasn't long enough
to fully recharge it .
The heat you feel in the plug of the tender is from it "straining" to
force juice into a battery that it senses needs it but the battery is
resisting taking it . It's kind of like that red face you got when 1
year old you were sure needed to be fed wasn't so sure it was willing to
eat . You've got the apple sauce on the spoon and the spoon up to
his/her face but the mouth just isn't gonna open and take it in .
There is one other consideration on tenders . They are most efficient by
a factor of about 3 when you install the short hard wire pigtail and
plug in and out of that as opposed to using the alligator clamps . A
tender is a very low amperage rickle charger . Any of its power wasted
through weak connectons is power the battery never sees . You think you
are giving it 1 1/2 amps but it is only seeing half that with the
expected effect on the charging time .Also as we add all kinds of neat
stuff to our cars , especially anything with a memory (stereo's are the
biggest culprit here) the draw on the battery goes up . this is why we
keep a tender on them in the first place but in some cases there is so
much draw that a real automatic 2 to 10 amp battery charger is a better
option than a tender .
Thanks,
Durf
(Battery tendered vehicles I have or am dealing with : 7 Zs , 1 2000 ,
5 Loti , 9 asst race cars , 2 Cortinas , 2 car trailers , 3 tow vehicles
, etc)
on first use it stayed red for more than 72 hours,
> which is the max it should have taken. I gave it another 48 hours, and
> it finally went green. The unit (block that plugs into the AC power)
> always feels a bit too warm even for when it is not actively charging.
>
>> I bought a battery tender about a week ago. After each drive since I
>> have hooked it up and the next day the little light has always been
>> green. I had the Roadster out last night with headlights on and an
>> auxillary power jack running my garmin. Today, about 18 hours since
>> hooking up the battery tender, the light is still red (not that
>> surprising I guess) but the plug end is very hot.
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